Mosquito nets safe to use in groin hernia repair: study

Sterilized mosquito nets cannot only prevent malaria, but can also replace costly surgical meshes in the repair of groin hernia,the most common type of hernia, a Swedish-Ugandan study said Wednesday.

The findings, published in the U.S. journal New England Journal of Medicine, showed that mosquito nets can be safely used to reduce the sufferings for up to 200 million people in low-income countries with groin hernias.

An inguinal hernia is a defect or a hole in the abdominal wall around the groin, through which fat, intestines and sometimes other abdominal organs can be pressed into a sack-like protrusion.

The only effective treatment is surgery and without surgery, inguinal hernias can cause considerable suffering and life-threatening complications that cause some 40,000 fatalities a year, said the study.

While close to 200 million people suffered from groin hernias, only 20 million operations were performed every year. One of the reasons that too few people are treated is that the scientifically tested meshes available on the market are very expensive.

"Commercial hernia meshes cost 100 U.S. dollars or more, which is too much for the health services and people living in poor countries," study author Jenny Lofgren from the Umea University in Sweden, said in a statement.

"So instead, doctors and surgeons in several countries have been using mosquito nets, but whether they are effective and safe hasn't been given sufficient study until now."

In the new study, Lofgren, together with colleagues from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Uganda's Makerere University, conducted a large randomized clinical trial to compare mosquito net with the regular commercial mesh used in hernia operations.

The study involved over 300 adult males from rural eastern Uganda who were randomly assigned to receive the one or the other type of reinforcement and were subsequently monitored for a year.

The results showed that the post-operative complications that occurred were normally mild and that there were no significant differences between the groups.

This was also true of self-rated satisfaction. Only one patient in the mosquito-net group had a recurrence.

All in all, the study showed that sterilized mosquito net is fine for use in hernia surgery without compromising patient safety and treatment efficacy, they said.

"These results are of great potential benefit to the many millions of people who lack access to good surgical care for their hernias," said study project leader and surgeon Andreas Wladis, associate professor at the Karolinska Institutet.

"The next step will be to motivate greater resource allocation to treat hernia patients and plan for how mosquito nets could be used for hernia surgery on a larger scale." Enditem